ObummerCare? Is the Abominable Act still on track?

Richard Walker of the National Center for Policy Analysis claims that ObummerCare will not succeed, and that the Abominable Act (my own name for this piece of trash law that finally shoved about the last bit of dirt into the grave of the old Republic) will die.

Here are his reasons:

There are 6 major flaws in the legislation that are so serious that Congress — both Democrats and Republicans — will be forced to face them, whether they want to or not.

ObamaCare is not paid for. At least not in any politically realistic way.

ObamaCare promises what it cannot deliver. In order for the country as a whole to get more medical care, there must be more doctors and nurses and hospital personnel – something that ObamaCare does not create.

ObamaCare mandates and subsidies will destabilize entire sectors of the economy. We could see entire firms dissolve and re-combine, just in response to health insurance subsidies, rather than based on economic considerations.

ObamaCare creates perverse incentives that threaten the quality of care. Within the newly created health insurance exchanges, insurers will profit from healthy enrollees and incur losses on the less healthy.

A weakly enforced mandate will undermine the health insurance marketplace. The fine for being uninsured will be small, relative to the cost of insurance. And there is not much the IRS can do to people who ignore the mandate, other than withhold refund checks.

A strongly enforced mandate will strain almost every family budget. If we are required to buy coverage and denied the right to scale back benefits, choose higher deductibles, etc., health insurance premiums will crowd out more and more of the average family’s budget.

Looking at these, my first thought is that these six “reasons” could be applied to virtually EVERY Federal Government legislation: they aren’t paid for (except by stealing MORE money), make promises that can’t/won’t/haven’t been kept, destabilize entire sectors of the economy, create perverse incentives that damage the quality of the services (or goods) provided, undermine the health insurance market, AND strain almost every family’s budget. So if these flaws don’t stop us from having the Post Office, TSA, DHS, SNAP, and all the rest, why will they stop the PPACA?

The answer? They won’t. Richard is (publicly at least) the same as a lot of other people: find the right words and the right wand waved in the right way, and all will be better. Well, it didn’t work on Tuesday and it won’t work next Tuesday. I suspect that the wonders of ObummerCare will go away at exactly the same time that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and SNAP go away.

It is just one more burden: a log on top of a hundred other logs on the camel’s back. The camel is dead from a broken back, but you just can’t tell because of all the logs stacked around it. But the GOP really doesn’t care – at least not the powers that control it.

Or as economist Paul Craig Roberts put it: “What the two parties fight over is not alternative political visions and different legislative agendas, but which party gets to be the whore for Wall Street, the military-security complex, the Israel lobby, agribusiness and energy, mining and timber interests.”

The object for the GOP powers-that-be (including 95% of those in Congress) now will be “how can we profit from this” rather than getting rid of it. So they won’t fix these things, just paper them over enough to last another two or four years. And we will ALL look like those skeletons in the waiting room that you see in the cartoons.

About TPOL-Nathan

Nathan Barton is a christian, self-governor (free-market anarchist), husband, father, professional engineer, Engineer army officer, private businessman, and writer, teacher, and preacher. He works and lives mostly in four western states, and is Southern by heritage and Westerner by birth, upbringing, and choice.